Why I See a Black Queer Therapist

Over the past year, I have been extremely worried about the bodily safety of a whole range of people in American society. Muslim and immigrant people who are threatened with deportation and hate crimes, poor women who have decreasing access to safe abortion, disabled people whose continued access to life itself is made even more precarious each time our already inadequate health system is threatened, and transgender women of color who face devastating levels of violence from strangers, intimate partners, and the state alike: All of these bodies are put at risk by rising xenophobia. So, too, are the bodies of Black and Chicano people at the hands of police, queer people who have decreasing civil rights protections, and transgender students and workers who want to be left in peace.

But what about the anguish this causes our minds? It’s not just our bodies that are under assault — it’s our minds that are being attacked, as well. As the white male rage of the nation is emboldened by the White-Identity-Extremist-in-Chief in the White House, the toll on everyone else’s mental health grows. When the president said last summer that there were “some very fine people” about people attending a white supremacist rally where a woman was murdered, it made nonwhite people feel so much less safe. So, too, did his saying that immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, and the entire African continent hail from “shithole countries,” a comment that causes people who come from those countries — and people who look like them — to feel distress.

Trump and the forces that elected him may deeply frustrate a lot of people, but Trump pushes some of us toward depression and emotional distress for particular reasons that are rarely addressed with mental health help specific to our needs. Therapists in the United States seem relatively likely to be prepared to deal with the emotional effects of misogyny (and the associated needs of the #MeToo movement), given that, according to a 2015 report from the American Psychological Association, “for every male active psychologist, there were 2.1 female active psychologists in the workforce.”

But American therapists are not prepared to deal with the very real wages of racism, nor with the mental health crisis of a president who equates Black and brown homelands as “shitholes.” While more than two thirds of them are women, 84% of all American therapists are white. It is not known how many therapists are queer or transgender — nor how many have even been trained to treat issues resulting from homophobia or transphobia — but anecdotally, I have long known that demand can’t keep up with the needs of queer and transgender friends to find a therapist who effectively knows how to help them.

It can literally drive you crazy when your mental health care is ran
by the people who are the reason you need mental health care.

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious means to be a rage almost all the time,” James Baldwin wrote. Periodically on Facebook, I have posted about how seeing a Black and queer therapist has helped me to keep my mind as intact as possible amidst all the crazy-making rage it has been subjected to for the past few years. Each time I have, Black and/or queer friends have enthusiastically reached out to me to ask for the name of my therapist or to seek help in finding someone like him near them. But I’ve often felt frustrated that I didn’t have much help to offer them if they didn’t live near enough to my own therapist (one of woefully few even here in New York City).

Fortunately, in 2017 I found out about the newly formed National Trans and Queer Therapists of Color Network, a referral tool for clients to find therapists like mine. This was also the year I first attended a conference called “In My Mind: A LGBTQ Peoples of Color Mental Health Conference.” When I saw a session was titled “My self-worth is not defined by the 13 inches of my Gay BBD (Big Black Dick),” I could tell the mental health needs of my tribe would be addressed by people who understood our urgent concerns.

When I finally got around to seeing a therapist for real as an adult — something I did about two years ago, but that I should have done about a decade earlier — I knew I wanted to see someone who was Black or queer for a couple reasons. First, one of the most exasperating consequences of the increasingly overt bigotry of recent years has been having to explain it to white liberals; as in my other intimate relationships, the last thing I wanted to do was to have to explain or defend this shit to my therapist. There was also the issue — as depicted so well by a meme of the scene from Get Out when Chris is hypnotized by the white psychiatrist mother of his girlfriend — that it can literally drive you crazy “when your mental health care is ran by the people who are the reason you need mental health care.”

Fortunately, I found something of a unicorn: a therapist who was Black and queer and — perhaps most magically of all — also took my insurance.

I initially sought therapy to cope with three things, which all had to do with race and racism. The first was that I was finding that reporting on the deaths of Black people as a journalist — particularly in having to write about what I called the “snuff films” that document police killings — was becoming emotionally untenable. I often had trouble sleeping whenever I knew there were Black protesters being assaulted by tear gas and tanks in some American city or another. After a day when I had to write up two different racial horrors (a column on a white supremacist shooting a Black Lives Matter encampment in Minneapolis in the morning, followed by the Chicago Police Department’s reluctantly released film of Laquan McDonald in the evening), I began to find my anxiety getting out of control.

Second, I’d begun a PhD program, and I was dismayed when I found myself in classes where I was the only nonwhite person. Almost everyone has the “imposter syndrome” fear of not being good enough in graduate school, but it is especially common and burdensome for students of color.

And finally, I sought therapy because my sister Sharron died in my first semester of grad school. A psychologist, Sharron was the only Black PhD I knew intimately who had gone through what I was enduring. Amidst reading and writing about what felt like an almost endless stream of Black death, I also had to contend with the death of one of the three remaining Black members of my nuclear family.

Through all of this, I tried to have grit and tough it out without therapy. This was partially out of shame, partially because I lied to myself that I’d survived a lot of grief and racism just fine before, and partially because I feared that if I opened up the door to what was plaguing me, I’d be swallowed whole and never get off the therapy couch.

Luckily, one gray winter day, two of my very caring fellow graduate students staged a lunchtime intervention over Korean fried chicken. They saw me wordlessly screaming for help and implored me to seek therapy. I got a referral from our college’s mental health center that day.

The first time I walked into my therapist’s office, I was struck that he had a book by bell hooks on his shelf, as well as another book about ethical polyamory. Even though he said little about himself, nothing about the way he presented — not his hairstyle, nor his vernacular, and certainly not his book choices — suggested he was striving for the false notion of “neutrality” that many professional settings seem to demand and that often results in queer people of color trying to pass as straight or as close to white as they can get.

I can’t say I felt that I was in a “safe space” entirely. There is nothing really safe about the therapy room if you accept that it is the place where you’re going to confront your deepest fears and secrets. In fact, it’s rather terrifying.

But the degree on the wall comforted me and reminded me that I was with another Black person who had survived graduate school. And as I looked around the small, warm office — and saw this kind Black face looking back at me, and took in his gaze as he listened to me — I knew it was a space safe enough to start exploring my anxieties and traumas.

Nausea washed over me right before I said the words I meant to say. My
breathing grew shallow, and my tongue felt like so many pounds of lead
as I tried to imagine it heavily repeating those heavy words: 'I’m
gay.'

After an early session, my therapist emailed me an essay by James Baldwin to read and recommended a book called Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We’re Not Hurting. And when I spoke about my nervousness at work or in school, he would say things like, “Systems of white supremacy are designed to make you feel nervous in primarily white spaces.” Hearing such a message from a white therapist — if they would bring it up at all — would require an act of what W.E.B. DuBois calls double consciousness. But I got to skip all that with my therapist, and I appreciated that he reminded me much more of Franz Fanon than of Sigmund Freud. His Black intelligence helped me to feel more comfortable with my own, and to breathe a little easier.

A few months into my treatment, I called my therapist from Orlando for a phone session during the week I spent reporting on the Pulse massacre — perhaps the most difficult week of my professional life. He talked to me as one queer person of color to another, helping me understand the wound a mutual community we both belong to (albeit in totally different spheres) had sustained. He also affirmed my understanding of the trauma as one that particularly affected queer Latinx people — which, in turn, affected how I framed my reporting.

My therapist will also sometimes say things like “As queer people of color in the world, we experience…” before putting into words things I have felt but couldn’t articulate. We experience. We are stereotyped in these ways. This real shit happens to us. It is so validating to hear a therapist confirm certain experiences (say, how white people will expect me to forgive them for why they’re afraid of me, or expect me to do extra work for free to help diversify workplaces they control) along the lines of This is what the world does this to us, and here’s what you can do about it rather than It’s all in your head, so get over it already.

Much to my surprise, the term “minority stress” was not originally applied toward race. At a workshop at the mental health conference for queer people of color, I learned that “minority stress” was coined in the 1990s by psychologist Ilan Meyer to explain the stress of hundreds of gay men he interviewed in New York City.

Psychologist Barbara Warren asked all of us in the audience of the session to close our eyes and recall, in our bodies, a time we came out to someone important to us. Viscerally, I time-traveled to October 4, 2003: the night I came out to my mother on her 65th birthday. (I had baked her a cake to drive my point home.)

Nausea washed over me right before I said the words I meant to say. My breathing grew shallow, and my tongue felt like so many pounds of lead as I tried to imagine it heavily repeating those heavy words: “I’m gay.” Though my mom was supportive and loving, it didn’t change how nervous I felt telling her — something my body could still re-create some 14 years later.

This is minority stress. As we shared what we’d felt, Warren told us this is how gay people may feel any time they even remember coming out. But she also noted — correctly — that Black people, and transgender women of color, and immigrants, may feel the “anticipation of trauma” of minority stress at any time in America. This anticipation is all the more likely with a president who seems to relish taunting with both insults and harmful policies 24/7. Like John Henryism, a medical understanding developed by Sherman James to explains why Black men die relatively young, minority stress has tangible psychological and medical outcomes.

I thought of this again the next day at the conference, when one Black transgender woman, Octavia Lewis, told another, Kiara St. James, that “Every day I leave my house, I wonder, will I return home?” The fears of someone like her are not just in her head — and an expert with specific training may be needed to help.

Over the course of my own treatment in therapy, I’ve discovered that the reasons I initially sought it did not, of course, fully explain why I needed it. There were all kinds of deeper things I needed to process. But I don’t know if I’d ever have gotten to a place to talk about these things with a therapist who wasn’t also Black and queer.

It’s not that I couldn’t have trusted someone else, but I’m not sure that they would have known how to most effectively guide me in looking at myself. So many of my issues are about shame — the shame of not being a more successful writer, the shame of not being “fit” enough to attract other men, the shame of not being tough enough to transcend racism and homophobia. He uses very few words in getting there, but my therapist is excellent at getting at this irrational shame of mine.

If I had gone to a straight therapist, shame about my gay sex life might have more easily held me back. Similarly, if I had been in therapy with a white therapist, it would have been too easy for me to look at their white face and buy into a subliminal message that white expertise should be the lens through which I judge my own experience.

I find that when I am looking at my therapist, he is reflecting the
best of me back at me.

Once, I spent an entire session in therapy talking about white supremacy triggered by a specific episode. Over dinner, an elderly white friend (who had previously implied I had gotten into all six PhD programs I applied to because of affirmative action) had been mocking my pronunciation of certain words. A fight ensued, and my therapist explained that the fight was not about the pronunciation of the words; it was really about white supremacy giving my friend license to police my language and “joke” in ways that asserted his dominance over me.

We then moved on to discussing professional situations where I’d been “the only one in the room” and been made to feel that I should make myself small, not express opinions, and simply act grateful. My black, queer therapist saw through the racist excuses I have, unfortunately, internalized. That time, as he has done repeatedly, he affirmed why I am righteously angry about racism and holds me accountable when I am suppressing my anger and letting it manifest in ways that are less healthy than expressing it.

At the mental health conference, I also attended a workshop about viewing trauma through a cultural lens. Its leaders, Adoja Osei and Jesse Harbaugh — Black and white therapists, respectively — laid out that a central component of contemporary therapy needs to be “recognizing race as a reality experienced by both therapist and client.”

This makes so much sense. Regardless of your race, you can’t read a newspaper without encountering race. You can’t open Facebook or Twitter without seeing stories about racism. You cannot ever listen to the president without encountering racism. You cannot exist in America without race affecting your mental health.

I am so lucky that I have this kind of therapy — where it’s not just me bringing issues of race to the room. Racial justice is something my therapist is already utilizing while treating me.

“Your work is important,” my therapist will sometimes say to me when I am talking about my writing. “You are important.”

This is always a little bewildering, if awkwardly pleasant, to hear. I spend most of my waking hours hating myself and believing I am not enough: that my writing isn’t good enough to be published or read, that I’m not smart enough to be in academia, that I’m not good enough to occupy the spaces I inhabit.

When I began therapy, I was expecting to be told everything I was doing wrong and scolded about why I’m such a fuckup and a failure. Instead, I’ve been lucky to have a therapist who tells me that I am enough. He knows and can tell me that the point of -isms is to make me feel like I am not enough. He can look at my life and my work with trustworthy Black queer subjectivity and tell me that the lies I am itching to tell myself about myself aren’t true.

The process of transference with a therapist can make looking at them something like looking into a special kind of mirror. For me, processing therapy through the watchful gaze of another Black face is healing. But unlike looking at a funhouse mirror — which reflects back a grotesque version of oneself — I find that when I am looking at my therapist, he is reflecting the best of me back at me. He is a prism able to help me see that, in being Black and gay and who I am in the world, I have the knowledge and tools I need to best understand myself and face my life.

I don’t mean to overstate what therapy has done for me. There have been sessions when I’ve struggled to think of anything meaningful to discuss. And when I’ve tried to apply lessons I’ve learned in therapy about racism, sometimes it’s made other people respect me — and sometimes it has ended career prospects and relationships.

But it’s always helped me to know myself and to understand whether people I know are committed to the same principles I am. In a country that wants me down on my knees, groveling for a place in it (and not, of course, taking a knee during the national anthem in protest), my queer Black therapist has helped me understand how to live with a healthier mind, and to wholly reject what America keeps trying to tell me, but that the deeper, better part of me knows to be wrong — that I don’t even have a right to live at all.

Steven W. Thrasher (he/him), a writer-at-large for the Guardian, is a doctoral student in American Studies at New York University. In 2012, he was named Journalist of the Year by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his writing in the New York Times, Village Voice, and Out.